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Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That? (Part Three.)

Sept 5, 2023, from The New York Times.

This leftward shift on American campuses corresponded with a realignment in the American electorate. In 2012, a majority of voters with a bachelor’s degree (and no further credential) chose Mitt Romney for president over Barack Obama; in fact, B.A. holders were the only educational cohort Romney won. Obama made up for his losses among college grads by winning a majority of voters with only a high school diploma. Four years later, the education skew flipped: Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton among noncollege graduates, but he won only 36 percent of voters with college or graduate degrees.

Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that this political realignment has contributed to the growing public-opinion divide on higher ed. As the Democrats have become the party of the college-educated, and as higher education has become dominated by left-leaning staff and students, Hess says, Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome.

Hess’s more pointed critique, though, is a populist one, and it reflects sentiments that can be found these days on the left as well as the right. Economists have shown that higher education as a whole has become more stratified by income and class over the last 20 years. After the Great Recession, state governments cut their funding for public colleges, and the colleges responded by raising tuition and cutting spending on instruction and student services. Many private colleges, meanwhile, competed to attract more affluent students, which often meant becoming more selective in admissions, spending more on facilities and amenities and raising tuition in order to pay for it all.

Hess says many conservatives have grown skeptical that students are learning much at these selective institutions. Instead, he says, college has become simply a place for students to collect a gold-plated credential.

“It’s a racketeering situation,” Hess said when we spoke last month. “In many elite occupations, the price of admission is now an elite degree. That’s true whether it’s a posh D.C. think tank or a big consulting firm or a fancy journalistic outlet.” For many students, Hess said, the point of an expensive college education is not to gain practical job skills. “It’s just a really expensive toll that lets you jump the queue and get the good jobs.”

In July, the economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman and David Deming helped illuminate exactly how that system works when they published the most recent in their series of research papers analyzing the intersections of social class and higher education. They examined admissions practices among what they call Ivy-Plus colleges (the Ivy League plus a few comparably selective institutions) and found a pervasive pattern of affirmative action for the very wealthy. According to their data, the children of the richest American families are twice as likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college as middle-class students with the same standardized test scores.

Chetty and Friedman and Deming showed that these institutions employ a variety of admissions practices that put a thumb on the scale for the rich and powerful: They soften admission standards for the children of alumni, and especially the children of wealthy alumni; they put extra weight on the extracurricular accomplishments and recommendation letters that students collect at exclusive private schools; and they recruit athletes from wealthy families. (It’s no accident that Ivy-Plus colleges field teams in sailing, squash, fencing and horseback riding.)

The “racket,” as Hess puts it, continues after college, when graduates of these institutions are three times as likely as similar non-Ivy-Plus students to be hired by a prestigious firm and 60 percent more likely to earn a salary high enough to land them in the top 1 percent of earners. Chetty and Friedman and Deming — all of whom work at Ivy League universities — put it starkly: “We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations.”

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